ALL ABOUT FOOD: On the food beat in North Vietnam

EDITOR’S NOTE: Terry Markowitz, her husband, Mark, and friends just returned from a trip to Southeast Asia. Following is an account of their “food” travels in the country.

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“Today, we are going to see how rice noodles are made,” said Fong, our North Vietnamese guide. He had quickly picked up on the fact that we were interested in all things concerning food. We found ourselves in a tiny village outside of Hanoi beside a narrow branch of the Mekong River. The village, perhaps 20 houses in size, is entirely devoted to the production of this staple food.

Tramping along a muddy trail, accompanied by dogs, chickens, snakes and some shy but very curious children, we came to a small group of low structures with dirt floors, the first of which contained three enormous pigs and two cute little piglets. The next was the “factory,” a room about 15 feet square, completely open to the elements on two sides.

After greeting the family, we were invited to watch the fascinating process that began with husking the rice and using the dried husks as the fuel for boiling water in the large pots that would later cook the raw noodles. The rice is ground into flour and mixed with water to make a dough that is kneaded by a young, shoeless and shirtless boy of 13 or so, then pushed through something that looks like a large hand-cranked pasta machine.

Out come big flat sheets of dough that another boy, squatting on top of a table, pushes down by hand with a wooden paddle into a metal tube about 5 inches in diameter and 12 inches tall with the bottom pierced by small holes. The tube goes into an extruder that presses the dough through the holes and out come long, long strands of thin noodles.

A woman is waiting with bare hands to catch them and dump them into boiling water. There are about six feet of noodles in each batch, and they cook for less than a minute. They are pulled out of the water with a wooden rake and skillfully laid out on a table in long curving strands to dry. This all takes place in a steam-filled atmosphere when it is already 95 degrees outside and the smell of the nearby pigs permeates the air. Later, they are packed in baskets and taken for sale at the local outdoor market.

As we walked out, we saw two men squatting on their haunches, carefully and gently hand-washing two roosters. “Those are fighting cocks,” Fong said. “They’re illegal, but almost everyone has one.”

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Miss Vi’s cooking school

A short time later, we were eating rice noodles at a cooking class in the historic town of Hoi An, (a UNESCO World Heritage site) at Miss Vi’s School of Cooking located upstairs above her restaurant, Morning Glory. The teacher was an attractive young girl who said she had been working in kitchens for 15 years, which seemed hard to believe, until she mentioned that she began working for Miss Vi when she was 12. She is now the head chef, manager and hostess of the restaurant as well as the cooking school teacher.

Our menu for the day was Vietnamese spring rolls, shredded cabbage and chicken salad, crispy pancakes with dipping sauces, and barbecued chicken. All the ingredients had been prepped and measured out so we could put them together like those people on the food network do, but even then, it was harder than it looked. The tricky part about the spring rolls is the rice paper. It functions the way a tortilla does “” to wrap everything up, except it’s so thin you can see through it and you have to moisten it to bend it. Ah, there’s the rub. Too much water and it will disintegrate, too little and it crumbles. Be prepared to waste a few “” we did! The other trick is to roll it around all the filling ingredients so that you can still pick it up without everything falling out.

The chicken salad was pretty easy and so was the barbecued chicken, but getting those crispy pancakes crispy, without burning them, is a college course. If you see them offered on a menu, order them because they’re delicious, but do not attempt this procedure at home.

In Laguna, we have the Crab Zone with chef Mindy preparing a number of Vietnamese dishes, including spring rolls.

Of course, there are an infinite number of Vietnamese restaurants in Orange County “” the closest is Pho Bac on Barranca, just north of Jeffrey in Irvine, but exploring Little Saigon off the 405 can be a real treat.

This cuisine is the lightest and the healthiest in Southeast Asia ... and it’s cheap!

ELLE HARROW and TERRY MARKOWITZ owned A La Carte for 20 years. They can be reached for comments or questions at [email protected]